Is Evolution Stoopid?

In a recent post I made the claim the evolution is a blind, stupid process that does what it does by brute-forcing through adjacent regions of possibility space with a total lack of foresight. When I said this during a talk I gave on superintelligence I met with some resistance along the lines of ‘calling evolution stupid is a mistake because sometimes there are design features in an evolved organism or process which are valuable even if human engineers are not sure why’.

This is true, but doesn’t conflict with the characterization of evolution as stupid because by that I just meant that evolution is incapable of the sort of planning and self-reflection that a human is capable of.

This is very different from saying that it’s trivial for a human engineer to out think evolution on any arbitrary problem. So far is I know nobody has figure out how to make replicators as good as RNA or how to make things that can heal themselves, both problems evolution has solved.

The difference is not unlike the difference between intelligence, which is something like processing speed, and wisdom, which is something like intelligence applied to experience.

You can be a math prodigy at the age of 7, but you must accrue significant experience before you can be a wisdom prodigy, and that has to happen at the rate of a human life. If one person is much smarter than another they may become wiser faster, but there’s still a hard limit to how fast you can become wise.

I’ve personally found myself in situations where I’ve been out-thought by someone who I’m sure isn’t smarter than me, simply because that other person has seen so many more things than I have.

Evolution is at one limit of the wisdom/intelligence distinction. Even zero intelligence can produce amazing results given a head start of multiple billions of years, and thus we can know ourselves to be smarter than evolution while humbly admitting that its designs are still superior to our own in many ways.